Feeling wildly excited about sinking your online business ships? If your answer is Yes, here are a few helpful hints that will help you smash web-bound business eggs before they get a chance to hatch. If you’re not ready to see your corporate kingdom take a nosedive just yet, however, use the list below as a rough roadmap to keep your internet-based business out of harm’s way.

1. Under-delivering on over-promises

Making promises you can’t keep is the way to go if you want to see your business fail in a matter of weeks. If you want your business to weather tough patches on the road to stardom and rise to web glory as one of the most reliable brands in the industry fast, though, you should aim for realistic delivery deadlines, service quality, and other relevant details pertaining to your side of the bargain. Remember: it’s better to promise less and deliver in full than to fall short of your own mark.

2. Running way behind the deadlines

Whoever said deadlines matter, right? They don’t matter all that much, really – on condition you couldn’t care less about the fate of your online business. In case your brand’s long-term success matters to you, however, you should take deadlines seriously and do your best to meet them. It takes just a few missed delivery deadlines or last-minute cancelations for customers to figure out that your brand is a sham and bounce off to competitors, bad-mouthing you as they go.

3. Keep pulling your users’ sleeve

What would you do if somebody kept tugging at your sleeve although you made a show of ignoring them? Showering existing and prospective customers with newsletters and promo e-mails is the easiest way to send their temper through the roof and shoot your brand’s success in the leg. You can find the biggest e-mail marketing no-nos in this article: don’t try them at home if you want to ensure sustainability and speedy sales growth for your web business.

4. Not taking brand security seriously

Should you care about your brand’s security? Absolutely not: brands that treat security with due consideration usually stay in business for years. If you don’t want to be one of them, it would be best to invest little or no funds in reliable hosting services, leave out trust signals from your site, and let malware and spyware feast on your brand’s confidential data. You should also strive to be careless with virtual data transfers and backups: after all, you won’t need that sensitive info if you’re looking to drop out of business hoops any time soon.

5. Not factoring in the mobile user

Why let mobile users access your goodies, right? Launching a web business with a desktop-first strategy is the shortcut to failure, so if you want your sales to plummet fast, you should by all means miss mobile traffic out from your business agenda. If you want your brand to grow, on the other hand, you may want to spend a little time and cash optimizing your website for mobile use: after all, in the world we live in, more people shop on a mobile whim than with a desktop-based premeditation.

6. No bedside social media manners

Brands behaving badly on social media aren’t exactly the happiest of corporate web campers. As much as you may loathe certain public figures – or your competitors, for that matter – it’s better to keep your private dislikes to yourself, or at least refrain from expressing them on your brand’s social media profile. If you want your brand to be regarded as an industry player to be reckoned with, you should keep up professional airs, both online and offline. Remember: social networks are an extension of your brand’s website, so keep Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram neat, sweet, and politically correct.

Shattering your brand’s success is easy if you know how to do it – and if you’re still here, you can now choose between the road to the closest corporate performance ditch or the garden of fast ‘n’ easy business growth. Pick your path wisely.